


Strength of the Pack

by spuffyduds



Category: Hard Core Logo (1996)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:41:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28143279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/pseuds/spuffyduds
Summary: Something's *wrong* with Joe.
Relationships: Joe Dick/Billy Tallent
Comments: 12
Kudos: 28
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Strength of the Pack

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feroxargentea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/gifts).



> Horror A/U. Drug use, violence, wild animal harm. ("Offscreen" and not explicitly depicted.)

Waking up covered in blood isn’t the weird part.

Because that’s happened before. He’s got a scar on his forehead where a fan or a hater or both, sometimes it was hard to tell, lobbed a full bottle at him--that didn’t knock him out but it made him slip on all the beer that was already on the stage and he whacked his head on Pipe’s kickdrum on the way down. Woke up with the audience gone, the rest of the band gone, the club’s janitor staring at him, and his hair stuck to the stage with dried blood because facial cuts bleed like a motherfucker.

Oh, and that time he passed the fuck out when Mary tried to pierce his ear with a sewing needle. BIlly has never let him forget that one.

So no, the blood is more of a “well, shit,” than a “what the fuck.” The what the fuck part is that he’s lying on the ground in a forest.

Joe doesn’t do forests.

He doesn’t do _nature_. Nature is boring and full of bugs.

He sits up, looks around. Nothing but trees and underbrush. He waits for whatever part of him got cut to announce itself, but nothing hurts beside a general “slept on the ground” achiness, so he pats himself all over. Seems intact. Still a little sore and puffy where that fucking nympho fangirl bit him on the chest last week. He should probably steal some more of John’s antibiotics. (John always has antibiotics. Joe has decided he doesn’t want to know why.)

He sniffs at his shirt, and yeah, definitely blood. It’s still a little damp in some spots and it smells like blood, smells like sucking a penny. So it’s somebody else’s--he’s got no idea who.

“Fucker had it coming, though,” he says to the boring trees, and then stands up and heads downhill. He’s got no idea if that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re lost in the woods, but at least it’s easier than uphill.

Turns out to be a good choice because he hits a road after just a few minutes. Sticks a thumb out and watches cars go by for a while before it occurs to him to zip up his jacket over his bloody shirt. Watches a few more go by, then thinks to lick a thumb and rub his face and yep, his thumb comes away bloody. He spits on a clean part of his shirt, scrubs around his mouth. (So much blood, Jesus, no wonder nobody was stopping.) Zips the jacket back up and finally gets a ride from a trucker.

He has to ask where the fuck he is, which gets him some side-eye, and he’s about 25 miles from the club they played last night, which is the last thing he remembers. What the hell.

He manages to fall asleep for a few minutes during the ride, and falls instantly into a dream of running and running, he’s always hated running but in the dream it’s so good, it’s exactly what his body wants to do, thighs pumping like they could go forever, hands hitting the forest floor in a good hard rhythm, why is he running on all fours, whole body hot with the joy of the chase, what’s he chasing? He doesn’t know.

The trucker shoves at his shoulder and he grunts out a thanks, climbs down and runs the mile or so left to the latest ratty motel. He doesn’t hate the running as much as usual.

The guys are pissed at him when he shows up. “Where the fuck have you been?” Billy says. “Checkout was three hours ago, we had to pack up your goddamn stuff, we’ve just been fucking sitting in the van for three hours and we gotta leave NOW to make the next gig.”

And Joe opens his mouth to tell them where he’s been and that he’s got no idea how he got there, reaches his hand to unzip his jacket and show off his bloodsoaked shirt, and then he...doesn’t. He doesn’t want them to know, and he doesn’t know why.

“None of your fucking business, get in the van,” he says.

He lets somebody else drive for once, though, lets Billy take the wheel, and he falls right back into that same dream. And it’s so good, hands and feet hitting the forest floor in a beautiful kickdrum rhythm, heartbeat pounding bass in his ears, all he needs is a good guitar line, maybe that’s what he’s chasing.

When Billy punches his shoulder he comes awake snarling.

“Jesus, Joe, get some fucking downers or something,” Billy says, and climbs out of the van.

He considers taking Billy’s advice--not that he’d tell him that. Pipe usually has a grab bag of pills, and they’ve all learned from experience which colors and shapes are probably uppers, which are probably downers, and which will probably make you have a screaming fucking meltdown in a Tim Horton’s because the ceiling fan is dropping chunks of light on your head.

He decides he’s kind of enjoying his current state, though. He feels twitchy and powerful and full of something that makes his usual level of rage look like minor pissiness. He can feel rage searing through his blood, rushing down veins, riding capillaries to the surface to simmer just under the skin. 

It’s fucking gorgeous, and when he takes the stage that night he’s...something different, something more than usual. He’s well aware that he’s usually the one you can’t take your eyes off onstage. (BIlly once called him a “fucking charisma monster,” right after they came off stage, and then shoved him into the men’s room and blew him in a stall, kneeling on the filthy floor. Finished him off and then stood up, said, “Goddamn you, you asshole,” and walked out.)

But tonight is next level. Tonight he’s prowling the stage, he’s slamming into Billy when they both rush the mic, he’s gripping the mike stand so hard he swears he can feel it bending, he’s screaming every word and every scream feels like it starts at the bottom of his spine and rips its way out of him.

Every person in the audience is screaming back at him, thrashing along to his voice, he’s the fucking Pied Piper and they’d do anything he wanted. He could fuck them all, he could sink his teeth into them, he could tear them all to pieces and it would be so, so beautiful.

After the show that night he’s the one shoving Billy, shoving him hard into their shitty motel room when Billy’s barely had a chance to get the door open, kicking the door closed behind them and shoving Billy onto the squeaking bed. Leaps onto him and pins him down and tears clothes with his teeth, and Billy’s gasping _yeah_ and somewhere in there he shoves a bottle of lube into Joe’s hand, and then Joe’s fucking him with everything he’s got and he’s got so much right now. Fucking him so hard the bed is squeaking like a thousand rats in chorus, rats who’d follow him anywhere.

He gradually comes down over the next few days. Never figures out exactly what happened, what the hell he took. He’d take it again in a heartbeat--he misses it, feeling like some kind of god of blood and carnage.

The next few weeks are the same old blur of too many hours in the van and too many nights in mildewy hotel rooms, never enough time onstage and never enough money from the clubs. Sometimes they shoplift food at gas stations. The rest of them have gotten pretty slick at it but they make John sit those grocery runs out because he always gets sweaty and shaky, keeps glancing at the cashier and looks guilty as fuck.

And the same old blur sounds--it doesn’t sound like much, probably, but growing up, from his first joyride, his first acid trip, his first arrest--Joe always figured he’d be dead by now. And he’s on the road with his boys, he’s making music, he’s not dead, it’s good, he’s good.

And he thinks they’re all in the same groove, he thinks they’re his own little pack, and then one night he goes to pick up their take from the club manager (it’s always either him or Billy now because Pipe would let a manager stiff them as long as he added to Pipe’s pill collection and John once walked away with zero fucking dollars because the manager recited a haiku about willows.) And he’s about to walk back into what passes for a green room with a fairly fat envelope for once when he hears Billy and John talking, and John’s saying “Yeah, man, you know I don’t want you gone, but you could play for anybody, you could do better.”

And then Billy says, “Yeah, I know it’s gonna fuck Joe up and I hate it, but I’m not gonna spend the rest of my goddamned life shoplifting Caramilks.”

Joe backs up slowly and quietly, turns around and walks all the way out of the club. It’s one of the nicer clubs they’ve played, there are a few lights in the parking lot and most of them actually work. One of the girls who was up at the front of the stage is waiting out there and shoots him a hopeful look, and he tells her to fuck off and keeps walking, because Billy is planning to leave, Billy is leaving, they’ve been together, in a band together since high school, Billy is _leaving_ and he _feels sorry for Joe_ about it.

He stops because he suddenly can’t walk anymore, can’t go forward anymore, there’s no direction he wants to go and nothing he wants to do, and then the weird light seeps through the nothingness he’s full of, the parking lot lights are working but the moon is still so goddamn bright, he’s never really thought about the moon because it’s part of boring nature but is it supposed to be that bright? It’s huge and bright and--hot, somehow, he’s so hot, he’s pulling at his shirt and it’s tearing and he’s dropping to his knees in the parking lot and everything hurts, everything hurts so much and Billy’s leaving and the moon is burning him, his hands hit the asphalt and they look strange and all the pain and terror rips a long howl past his sharpening teeth. Somewhere far away the the girl he told to fuck off is screaming.

This time waking up in the forest is less “What the fuck?” and more “This again.” Boring nature, check. Bloodsoaked shirt, check, with bonus rips this time. He sighs and sits up, hoping the nearest road is downhill again.

And then sees what’s left of the deer a few feet away.

He screams and scrabbles desperately away from it. He puts a tree between him and the deer and then throws up, and carefully doesn’t look at what he just threw up, stands up wobbly and leans against the tree for a while. He maybe cries a little.

Okay, he sobs until he’s hiccupping, because something is _wrong_ with him and he doesn’t know what, and because Billy is leaving, his whole life is changing in ways he never could have imagined, never gave permission for.

After a while he cleans up his face as much as he can, zips his jacket up over the bloody torn shirt. There’s some blood on the jacket this time too, but at least it’s a dark material. Trudges downhill and yeah, eventually hits a road.

This one actually looks familiar--there’s a gas station he can see a ways down that he’s pretty sure they gassed up at last night; one of those big ones with food and drugstore-type stuff. Pipe bought three boxes of Star Wars bandaids for no apparent reason. Joe heads for the station, digs change out of his jeans for the pay phone, and calls the motel. At least it’s not checkout time yet.

The clerk who answers sighs a lot but finally agrees to go get Billy.

He tells Billy where he is and to come get him right now, tells him to shut the fuck up when he starts asking questions, and hangs up. Then just stands there for a long time with his forehead pressed against the cold glass of the phone booth.

Finally he heads into the gas station. He needs a cup of hot coffee and maybe some antibiotic ointment for that stupid bite that’s still puffy and sore. It’s the least of his troubles right now, but maybe fixing one tiny thing will help him get his head around this big impossible thing, this thing where he’s maybe going crazy.

He goes up to the counter to pay--he’s not shoplifting with no car, no place to run to, and scalding hot coffee in one hand. 

“How’s it goin’,” he says to the clerk. Which is more conversation-with-strangers than he usually bothers with, but right now he needs to pretend to be a regular human, to make sure he can still do that.

“It’s going for shit is how it’s going,” the clerk says, and rubs wearily at his eyes. “I worked the late shift last night and a bunch of teenagers holed up in here for hours, saying they’d seen a monster outside. Loud buncha assholes.”

Joe tenses up, fights the urge to bolt out of there, and then the clerk says, “Swear to god, everybody goes crazy on a full moon.”

Everything whites out for a second, and all Joe can hear is the pounding of blood in his head. And when he comes to, when he can see and hear again, he’s sitting on the cold floor of the gas station. He miraculously hasn’t spilled his coffee, and the clerk is asking if he’s okay.

“Yeah. Sure,” he says. “What day is it?”

“Uh. Thursday.”

“I mean. Day of the month.”

“Twenty-seventh. You sure you’re all right?”

“Fantastic,” Joe says, carefully stands up and walks outside and just breathes for a while, and does the math.

He does the math four or five times, trying to make it come out different, but it always comes out the same way. Four weeks since the last time this happened.

“Fuck,” he says quietly, to the empty road.

So. He’s a monster now. It’s less surprising than it seems like it ought to be.

He tries, for a few minutes at least, to be a noble monster. He really does. He thinks about just heading out into the deep woods where at least he can’t hurt any humans. (And where, let’s face it, he’d probably starve or freeze to death before the next full moon anyway.) 

He’s making all sorts of plans about saying goodbye to the band, about striking nobly out on his own to keep everyone safe, and then Billy pulls up in the van. Screeches the shitty brakes and jumps out of the van and starts yelling at him for fucking disappearing again.

“The fuck do you care, you’re leaving anyway,” Joe says, and Billy’s face--Billy’s face tells Joe that yeah, he really is.

And suddenly no, Joe’s not going to be noble, he’s never going to do that because Billy is planning to leave and that can’t happen, Billy is nothing without him and he’s nothing without Billy. Billy doesn’t get to walk off and be a human and leave Joe here a monster, no fucking way, they’re going to be monsters together.

He grabs Billy by the shirt and hauls him closer, yanks the collar aside and sinks his teeth into Billy’s shoulder, and there’s blood in his mouth and it’s hot and good, and when Billy starts screaming he just bites harder.


End file.
